Over 1.5m ‘abandoned’ apps on Google & Apple stores

There are more outdated apps in Google and Apple’s stores than those being actively updated, according to new research.

Analytics firm Pixelate said there are 1.5 million “abandoned” apps that haven’t been updated in two years, outnumbering the 1.3 million that had been updated in the past six months (www.snipca. com/41994). Apps that aren’t being regularly updated can pose a security risk.

In total, Pixelate analysed five million apps across both stores in the first three months of 2022, finding 650,000 neglected apps in Apple’s store, and 869,000 in Google’s.

It also identified 314,000 “super abandoned” apps that haven’t been updated in over five years.

The report comes a few weeks after Apple started emailing developers to warn them that it would remove apps that haven’t been updated “in a significant amount of time”. It gave developers 30 days to update their apps.

On its App Store Improvements page (www. snipca.com/41995), Apple says it is “implementing an ongoing process of evaluating apps, removing apps that no longer function as intended, don’t follow current review guidelines, or are outdated”.

Apple’s policy affects apps that haven’t been updated within the past three years, and those that “fail to meet a minimal download threshold”, which covers apps that haven’t been downloaded at all or “extremely few times” during a rolling 12-month period.

Anyone who has already installed a removed app will be able to continue using it, but it will be delisted from the App Store, preventing any new downloads.

Google is also stepping up measures to remove old apps by forcing developers to make their apps work with either Android 11 (released 2020) or Android 12 (released 2021).